Ram Nath Kovind Quotes

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

I grew up in a little funny town called Xuzhou, in the countryside, very poor. We didn't have hot water. We were four children: three girls and a boy.

My dad used to hunt ducks, and my mom would put them in the pot. We lived really modestly. We had very little money.

I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.

I've come to realize how much it really was a part of my upbringing, the Georgia part. We were away from town. It was just dirt and trees and spouses. And a lot of kids - my cousins, who were all like brothers and sisters to me - just a lot of kids at one time.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

I had a good upbringing, we didn't have any money, but there was a lot of love in my family.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

Our poor white people . . . are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest.

This was life in the '30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

My grandmom worked as a maid for most of her life, and she worked in the tobacco and the cotton fields, whatever she could get.

I was born in the poor countryside. I was raised in the countryside, planting corn and selling sweets made by my grandmother.

I grew up on a working farm. It was small, a hundred acres, but we had cows and pigs and chickens and sheep and a vegetable garden. I spent hours pulling weeds, hoeing, feeding the horses, cleaning out the stalls. My dad was a tough taskmaster. I always worked, but we also had fun.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

I was born in South Carolina. On my dad's farm, I didn't have much. I'm just a poor kid who worked in a produce market.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

When I was a kid, I lived in a poor part of Chicago, and I remember my brother and me using towels as capes. My son does it, too.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

Life for my family was a real struggle, as it was for most in those farming communities in Alabama.

I was from this small town, and my parents were poor.

I am still the same village girl from Dhing who used to help my father in the paddy field, help mother in household chores, run for hours on the streets of Dhing, play football with my Mon Jai group friends.